‘Dracula’ is scary, but has some issues

The Interplayers production of “Dracula,” the 1927 stage version, succeeds on the most fundamental level: It’s scary.

On the way out, I overheard numerous audience members say that this classic gothic horror story had gotten under their skin, especially the well-orchestrated ending. I heard the words “freaked out” used.

I am in complete agreement. The finale of this melodramatic-but-compelling play was well-designed to deliver the maximum quotient of creepiness.

Obviously, this play can’t get by on sheer suspense alone. After 70-plus years, everybody knows that Count Dracula is not exactly going to turn out to be a lovable-but-eccentric new neighbor at Dr. Seward’s Sanitarium.

Yet it can still get by on sheer dread. Director Nike Imoru skillfully builds the sense of dread through the first two acts – with dogs howling in the night and lunatics howling in the day – and then delivers a juicy climactic confrontation at the end.

When our heroes – Dr. Seward, Jonathan Harker and Abraham Van Helsing – discover a secret passageway to Dracula’s castle, Imoru has them enter from offstage, a flashlight cutting through the auditorium’s darkness.

After a dramatic confrontation, and the stake-through-the-heart denouement, Imoru has all the characters walk in slow-motion onto the stage, in a living-dead symbolism. And then, when we think it’s all over, Van Helsing, on a mostly darkened stage, delivers one final, chilling post-script. Go home and sleep well, he says. But vampires are real.

If that doesn’t make the hairs on your neck stand up …

That said, this production has a few, shall I say, issues.

The style of acting, in particular, presented a few problems. Michael Maher, as Count Dracula, pulls off the nearly impossible feat of being even weirder and more stylized than Bela Lugosi. His voice is a strange high-pitched hiss, his accent is thicker than goulash, and his movements are like slow-motion Tai Chi, yet somehow awkward as well.

It approached camp, yet I don’t think it was intended that way.

Accents were a problem in several other areas. Craig Dingle’s Cockney orderly, Butterworth, was nearly impossible to understand.

David Seitz’s Van Helsing spoke in a thick accent (Dutch?) that was also a challenge to decipher. Yet Seitz, who tends to be overly mannered, turned out to be a good choice in this role. You’ll never mistake this Van Helsing, in his argyle sweater, for the Van Helsing action-hero of the current movie. Yet Seitz builds the character gradually from a slightly flakey occultist to a resolute and determined foe of Evil.

The best performance, by far, comes from Damon Abdallah as the bug-gobbling lunatic Renfield. This role is a technical challenge, demanding that the actor lurch from raving psychotic to lucid harbinger of doom. Abdallah uses every part of his body – the turn of his head, the hunch of his shoulders, the scrabbling of his hands – to signal the terrifying struggle occurring in the battleground of his soul.

Abadallah energizes every scene he inhabits. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he carries the first two acts of this play, which otherwise tend to be a bit talky.

The other cast members – including Kate Parker as Lucy Seward, John Ullman as her lover Harker, Caryn Hoaglund as the maid, and Todd Wallace as Dr. Seward – do a good job of creating a sense of foreboding.

Just as important were all of the ominous details. John Hofland’s excellent set is lined with gloomy blocks of granite. The lighting design by Dean Panttaja created a deep and foggy gloom of its own.

Meanwhile, Imoru choreographs the I-want-to-drink-your-blood scenes with a distinct erotic (yet strictly implicit) charge. This awful sense of attraction has a pleasure all of its own. Yet it only makes the dread strike deeper.